This is an essay I wrote about my nephew, who was involved in a very serious motor vehicle accident.
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On January 2, 2001, my 20-year-old nephew Nicholas (Nik), a former high school state champion distance runner, was involved in a road rage-generated two car accident that left him with multiple broken bones, internal injuries (no liver laceration or spinal injury, thank God), and severe head trauma. When I arrived at the small town hospital two hours away and saw him in ICU, I didn't recognize him. His head was swollen to the size of a basketball and he had already had surgery to relieve the pressure from the bleeding inside his skull. His face had been flattened and pushed to one side, with many teeth knocked out. The only part of him I could hold was the tip of his left pinkie finger. There is absolutely no pain like that of seeing a child you love laying there all busted up, tubes everywhere, with a machine doing his breathing for him.
The driver of the other vehicle had become angry when Nik passed him (legally) on a two-lane country road. The guy was driving a "monster truck" with a steel I-beam welded to the front that served as a front bumper. He chased Nik, who was driving a small sports car, for 56 blocks before Nik spun on some gravel and the guy T-boned him in the driver's side. Nik caught the I-beam across his face. There were no skid marks. The truck pushed the sports car almost 100 feet before it stopped. Nik died at the scene, according to an eyewitness. He stopped breathing for several minutes, then suddenly took a huge breath on his own - the bystander didn't know CPR and didn't want to touch him because of all the blood.
It took three days to stabilize him and get him Life-Flighted to Harborview Trauma Center here in Seattle. He was conscious at first, off and on, but after a couple of days he slid into a deep coma. There he stayed for six weeks, as his vitals crept down by millimeters. He was failing in agonizing tiny steps, things slowing down, and the doctors couldn't do a thing. It was like watching this handsome, vibrant, athletic young man just fade away. Finally, the neurologist ran tests and stated that there was "no brain activity on the left side of the brain, and only the slightest detectable on the right." (CT scans of the brain the first night had shown derangement of the actual brain tissue - a very bad sign.) The neurologist met with my brother and my ex sister-in-law and told them that eventually, they would have to make some decisions.
I have never lived through a darker night. I kept remembering the day he was born, the times I took him to the park as a toddler, the photo I have of him at age 6 sitting in his grandpa's armchair smiling the same smile as the jaunty Mr. Potato Head standing on the chair arm next to him. I told my brother, "Well, they're going to have to think of something to do for him, because I'm not ready to stand at his graveside. I can't and I won't. This is not going to happen."
So, in time, my brother and Nik's mom decided they would take him off the ventilator. The neurologist had said it was almost certain that Nik would not breathe on his own. The insurance company was starting to make noises about not wanting to pay for sustained life support, considering the prognosis.
So the day came when we all went to the hospital, and they got everything set up to take Nik off the ventilator. They allowed only Nik's mom and dad and my mother in the room. The doctor said he would do a "trial run" - stop the ventilator support and see what happened before removing it for good. The moment came, and Nik lay there, still. After about two minutes, damned if that kid didn't take another deep breath on his own, just as he had at the accident scene. He began breathing slowly and regularly, and didn't stop.
The neurologist called it the most stunning thing he had ever seen. He couldn't explain it. CT scans showed the brain tissue was now in its normal configuration, with no sign of injury.
Over the next few weeks, Nik slowly, slowly came up out of his coma, came back from wherever it was he had gone. He began moving his toes and feet, then started squeezing my brother's hand in response to commands. He made his way back to us, bit by bit. One day he opened his eyes and looked at his mother. A few weeks later, I went to see him in his hospital room, and his mother, who had been working ceaselessly with him to recover his motor skills, told him over and over, "Say it for Auntie. Tell her what you can say, Nik. Come on, you can do it. Tell her." He stared at her for a while, his mouth working, then looked slowly from her face to mine, his features as innocent as a baby's, and in a hollow, raspy voice, spoke the words, "My name is Nik."
Over the past 15 months, he has slowly recovered from the trauma. For a long time, his memory was badly affected. He would ask the same question over and over. He didn't remember his friends, or anything he had done in high school. He couldn't remember that my brother-in-law had died, and kept asking for him, and wept every time we told him Randy was gone. He had to be cared for like a child, and sometimes became stubborn and angry. He wanted to isolate, but we didn't let him. We'd take him to a movie, and upon returning home, he would go back to bed, saying he wanted a nap before we went to the movie.
He was much improved by Halloween, though, and it was good to see him relating to everyone. For the first time, he was IN there... it was him, back again, not some faint shadow of the young man we all knew. He had learned again how to bathe and groom himself, and he looked like himself. My brother told me that when the maxillofacial surgeons had begun working on Nik, they had applied pressure to a certain point on his left cheekbone, and to their surprise, his entire facial bone structure had popped over to the right - back into place! The whole structure had shifted as a whole, and all it took was a little pressure to reverse the shift. They had feared the necessity of several surgeries.
His left optic nerve was severed, so he is partially blind, but that's the only permanent injury. Everything else has healed good as new, or nearly.
The reason for this ramble is that I received an email from my brother, Nik's dad, last week. He said Nik, who recently set aside the cane he's been using since he got out of his wheelchair, requested that he be taken out to the high school track. My brother thought he wanted to just sit there and look, and remember, but when he pulled up in the parking lot, Nik got out and began walking slowly toward the track.
He arrived at the oval, stood for a moment, and then moved out onto the rough surface. All around the inner edge, at a shuffling walk, he "ran" for the first time since his accident. He ran all the way around, stopping often, resting a few times for several minutes, but he crossed the finish line.
